Old bus based systems you did that too. I remember once sending a dozen cards to a customer who had an intermittent issue.

An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.

https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/

Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.

Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.

Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.

I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.

Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.

The classic psychological explanation is the patient only thinks they are sick. But the reality is their body is behaving like they are sick. Worse the classic explanation why you feel sick is 'toxins' from an infection and that is wrong. It's your reaction to feedback from your immune system.

I keep mentioning this because it's notable. California now needs to increase demand for electricity to move forward on electrification. Things like low cost workplace charging and mass adoption of heat pumps. Unfortunately California is going to elect a governor who thinks it's his job to protect entrenched interests. Fortunately big picture it doesn't matter except to people in California.

Currently renewable manufacturing is doing the the equivalent of adding 10 million barrels/day of oil production per year. Total production is 110 million barrels/day. Demand destruction for oil is coming very soon now.

Helps when religious leaders are against it. The Catholic church was against forced marriage which is why that mostly died out in Europe during the middle ages.

Looking student grades for 2025.

A's 30% B's 45%

2 out of 254 got an A+

I look at grade inflation still being a problem at elite schools and shake my head.

On the other hand it can make sense based on arbitrage. In a lot of markets the cost of the system is unfairly subsidized. People on the losing side of that can lower their costs with roof top solar.

There is the idea of the path loss exponent. In a vacuum it's 2.0. 900Mhz with clutter it's -2.5 At 2.4 MHz it's -3 and -5.8 it's -3.5.

Other downside for higher spreading factor spectrum is data rate drops which results in longer packets. Longer packets means more energy per packet and a higher chance someone else will blow your packet out of the water.

You've been able to buy 900 and 2.4GHz transceivers for the last 20 years.

“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"

Even before AI copyrighting software was questionable.